


Wolves of Ice

by Sholio



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 02:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21263438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: It walks the dark halls of the ship, they say. It is larger than a bilgesnipe, but it is not a bilgesnipe. It is cold as ice. Its claws clatter on the metal decking and leave frost in their wake. Its eyes glow in the dark.





	Wolves of Ice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).

There is something on the ship with them.

Thor hears of it first in rumors and whispers, overheard mainly in late-night drinking sessions when ale has loosened tongues. As king and Allfather, he cannot partake of these as he once did, but he still wanders around the edges, soaking up bits of knowledge about his people's concerns, their hopes, their worries.

Their fears.

It walks the dark halls of the ship, they say. It is larger than a bilgesnipe, but it is not a bilgesnipe. It is cold as ice. Its claws clatter on the metal decking and leave frost in their wake. Its eyes glow in the dark.

It chased Skarde down the passage between the storerooms and the engine room, they say. It hunted Odger in the hangar bay, a fearsome game of hide and seek, never fully seen, only glimpsed.

Thor sighs and goes to see his brother.

*

"You think I'm haunting the ship with illusions and ice magic?" Scorn curls in Loki's words. He stands in the door of his quarters in such a way that Thor can't get past him without physically moving him.

"No, of course not," Thor says, and Loki gives him a look that eloquently conveys that he still considers Thor the worst liar in the Nine Realms. "I simply thought that, as a master of illusion magic and shapeshifting, you would be -- er -- the best positioned among us to investigate this new threat."

"Really."

"And ensure that it ceases to trouble us," Thor says. "Immediately, if possible."

"Yes, yes."

"You would be a hero, brother."

"If you're quite done making unwarranted insinuations ..." Loki attempts to shut the door in his face. Thor catches it.

"I like what you've done with the place," he says. A peace offering, and a true one.

Loki glances over his shoulder, caught somewhat off guard. His room is small, with space on the ship at a premium, but it seems much larger (and may actually _be_ larger, for all Thor knows; manipulation of space is well within Loki's skills). But the most striking thing about it is the plants. Loki has turned his quarters into an indoor garden, an odd hodgepodge of plants from different planets and different parts of Asgard. Slender, candy-striped icespire should not be able to exist side by side with the lush leaves of tropical skybloom, but here it does. Bright light filters through the leaves, its source unclear. It's like a little piece of the outdoors inside, a window to a brighter world now lost to them.

"It's a hobby," Loki says. "It keeps me out of trouble, you might say."

Thor gives his brother a thoughtful look, assessing him. Loki looks tired. Worn down. But then, they all do, these days. Thor has seen the same expression in his own mirror. Still, he asks, "Are you well, brother?"

"When am I not?"

Not at all a suspicious answer or one that should be cause for concern. But he doesn't know what to say to Loki, knowing that any expression of concern would be brushed off, any offer of assistance would push him even further away.

"Please tell me if you hear anything, brother," he says instead, and Loki grunts and closes the door in his face.

Thor hopes that will be the end of it.

*

It's not the end of it.

Glowing eyes in the darkness, the clicking of huge claws in the shadows. No one goes to the deepest, darkest parts of the ship alone anymore, only in twos and threes. Rumors grow teeth, and race around the ship on swift feet. It is a monster, it is a ghost, it is a beast sent by their enemies to plague them, it is all their sins as a people made manifest. 

The young people organize hunting parties. They come back empty-handed from the bowels of the ship, but safe -- and Thor is not sure which he is more glad of.

He goes to see Loki again, and finds Loki methodically trimming the tips from a slightly overgrown winter-rose. Where all these plants came from, Thor has decided not to ask. He isn't even sure if they're real or illusion, but they seem real enough.

"How many times do I have to say it's not me?" Loki says shortly.

"I believe you." The strange thing is, he does. At least he believes that it's not something Loki is doing on purpose. Loki is many things, a liar and a manipulator among them. He is capable of being cruel, and hurting people for his own ends. But _this,_ after all their people have been through -- no. This is not Loki's doing. Not consciously, at least.

But he is by no means sure that Loki is uninvolved.

"I wanted to ask for your help," he continues.

"Didn't you do that already?" Loki says without looking at him.

"I mean, we should work together. This thing must be found and stopped, Loki, before someone is killed."

"No one will be killed," Loki mutters, and Thor's extensive Loki-related early warning system goes off on full alert.

"And what does that mean, exactly?"

"It means no one is in danger," Loki says flatly, to the rosebush rather than to Thor. "... Yet."

"When you said you weren't doing it --"

"I'm not!"

"But you know what it is." A statement, not a question -- and he wishes, after all this time, that they could just _trust_ each other, a little more than they do.

Maybe Loki is thinking the same thing, because he lets out a long sigh, and then he sets aside the shears and gets up.

"Come with me," he says quietly, and leads Thor back into the jungle.

*

It soon becomes evident that Loki's quarters are not just slightly bigger than they should be, but a great deal bigger, and in a very confusing way. It seems as if they take far too many turns to get where they're going, as if a part of the room that should be a mere step away is across the room instead, or on the ceiling.

"You remember what Mother told us about folding space, Loki, don't you?" Thor says after a climb up a hill that not only should not exist, but probably doesn't; it's just that the floor underneath them is oriented at an angle to actual reality. It makes his head hurt.

"If you do it too often, it'll stick that way," Loki says in the tone of someone quoting a childhood admonishment. "Spoken like the one in the family who couldn't do it at all."

Thor starts to respond, but then they come around a ... bend, or a twist, or a valley; it's very hard to say, but the room does something weird and then they're walking into another place.

It's cold, is the first thing he notices. This place is made of ice. Like Loki's room, it's folded and twisted upon itself, a convoluted place that is much bigger than it should be. 

And it's made entirely of ice and light. Thor has seen many things throughout the Realms, but he has never seen its like. It is one of the most beautiful things he's ever seen, an infinite labyrinth of rainbows and ice, filled with fragile glassine versions of plants and sculptures. It goes on and on.

"Loki, this is ... what is this place?"

The rainbow light plays across Loki's face. There's a kind of deep satisfaction in his expression, combined with an odd sort of fragility. "It's my place."

"I don't understand."

Something uncoils from a pillar. Loki holds out a hand, and a snake made of ice coils around his arm. When Thor reaches for it, captivated, it melts away on his fingertips and he pulls his hand away in shock and horror. 

"Did I destroy it?"

Loki smiles at his expression. "No, you cannot; it's not really here. None of this is here." He frowns. "I think."

"Illusion?"

"Not ... precisely." They walk deeper into the ice labyrinth. More creatures flicker just out of sight. Birds, their translucent wings chiming like bells. An ice deer clatters through the passageway in front of them (or possibly behind or above; space stretches in odd ways here).

"I made this," Loki says, "or perhaps ... found it, long ago. When we were children. It was not like this then; it was much simpler, not much more than a single room. A child's wish for solitude, a place to read uninterrupted by boisterous, annoying brothers."

"I do remember looking for you frequently and being unable to find you."

"I know," Loki sighs in exasperation. He runs his fingertips across the edge of a rose made of ice. When Thor follows suit, it melts, collapsing like frost feathers in the sun.

"And it's not real, you say?" Thor says, guiltily wiping his damp fingers on his tunic.

"I don't know how real it is. I lost it for many years, or perhaps it was only that I didn't need it. I ... found it again, when ..." He grimaces. "Suffice to say that when imprisoned, it is useful to have a place to be free, if only in one's mind. I made it much larger then, and filled it with everything you see."

"Including the animals?" Thor says, as a frost butterfly with handspan-wide rainbow wings flutters lazily between the two of them.

"They, er, happened. A lot of this place is like that. It's hard to say if I'm making it or discovering it. A little of both, I expect."

"I see," Thor says, not seeing at all. Loki gives him a familiar look, irritated and knowing and fond.

"In any case, there's one thing I do know about this place, whether it's in my mind or something I made or something that always existed. Things here stay here. They don't come back into the real world."

"Except now they apparently do."

Loki is quiet. The two of them pass through a curtain of icicles so fragile that they chime like a symphony as they crash and break behind.

"It's not really there," Loki says at last. "In the real world. At least, I don't think so. It's half here, half there. It won't harm anyone because it _can't."_

"And will it stay that way?"

A long silence. Loki trails his fingers along the wall and doesn't answer. He doesn't have to.

Something dawns on Thor slowly, putting together all that Loki has said, all that Loki was and has been -- "Am I the first person you've ever brought here?"

Loki doesn't answer. He touches an icicle, holds up his hand to trail his fingers through the dangling, tinkling leaves of a willow-like tree. "And the last," he says finally. "If it really is breaking through to the real world, I must let it go. There is ... a great deal here, that should not exist there."

Thor decides not to ask what sort of things, if giant ice-wolves are the least of it. Instead he says simply, "Will it hurt you?"

Loki makes a scornful noise. "No more than closing a door."

That's not really what he meant -- well, it _is_ what he meant, but he also understands enough to know that this place is more than just another place to go walking, for Loki. It would be possible for someone with Loki's powers to recreate it down to the last detail, but it wouldn't be the same.

But something else occurs to him now, and he laughs quietly to himself.

"Something funny, brother?"

"Oh ... only that I wonder how much of your decision to close the door to this place has to do with things from here leaking over there, and how much is to do with the reverse. If the door begins to swing wider, people from the ship might come here, might they not? To your place of solitude. And you would break it to keep them out."

"Thank you for that analysis, _Doctor_ Odinson." Loki touches a wall, and around his hand the wall shivers and melts. The green leaves and flowers of the garden in his quarters seem too bright, almost garish, after the delicate restraint of the other place's prisms and rainbows. 

Which, once again, makes Thor turn a thoughtful gaze on Loki, feeling as if he just gained another piece of insight into his brother.

Loki gestures behind them, and the wall seals up and becomes a bulkhead of the ship once again.

"What do you need to do?" Thor asks. "To ... close this door."

"That. I just did it."

Thor looks at him. 

"Oh, stop it with the insinuations already. There is no backdoor. The deed is done. No more monsters will stalk the nightmares of the Asgardian remnant population ... except, perhaps, for the ones they bring with them."

"Then I thank you, brother," Thor says sincerely. "And Asgard thanks you. And ..." He smiled and he hopes Loki can see how much he means it. "I appreciate you showing it to me, before you sent it away."

Loki looks as he often does when Thor compliments him, caught somewhere between embarrassed pleasure and the urge for a sarcastic retort, the two impulses combining to briefly still his silver tongue. But only briefly. He reaches for the shears. "And if we're quite done, I was busy when you came, as you can see."

There ought to be more to say, Thor knows. But he has never been the one of the two of them who is blessed with words. After an awkward moment, he slaps Loki on the shoulder, and sees himself out.

*

The monster does not vanish immediately, at least not from the rumors running rampant around the ship. But it is evident, to Thor at least, that new sightings are little more than the fruits of gossip and fear.

Not so, perhaps, the glass-winged butterflies that flutter through his dreams.

When he mentions it to Loki, there is only a shrug. "I'm not responsible for your dreams, brother."

"Shall I expect ice wolves in my quarters? I should look forward to a good fight."

Loki only snorts in reply. They are sitting on the floor in the middle of Loki's garden. Thor brought the icewine; Loki has provided fruit. Thor does not ask if it is illusory or real, and tries not to wonder what they might actually be eating instead. He does actually trust Loki at this point not to poison him. At least not severely.

"Halls quiet?" Loki says. "No patterings of little wolf feet to disturb the slumber of the just?"

"Not that I've heard."

Loki leans back and turns the goblet between his fingers. It seems, to Thor's eye, that he looks more well-rested than he has lately. A little less fidgety and pale. 

A place like that, Thor thinks, could draw one such as Loki, encouraging explorations beyond the need for food or sleep. An escape can become its own kind of prison. It might have even been drawing from him directly. Using magic always did wear him down, sooner or later. Thor finds himself wondering whether the longer Loki stayed there, the more of him _was_ there, and the less of him here.

Perhaps on some level, Loki knew that he was going to have to shut the door sooner or later. Perhaps the wolf was only an excuse, not the reason.

But he showed the place to Thor beforehand, and left the door open long enough to do so. There was no need for him to.

"You're uncharacteristically pensive tonight, brother," Loki remarks. "I can hear you thinking from over here. Your brain is not made for such work; you might damage something."

"I might shove your face into that rosebush."

"But how will you do that," Loki says, "if I am ... over here?"

Thor idly lobs a piece of fruit at the version of his brother sitting by the door. It goes through his head and bounces off the wall.

"I seem to recall that worked better on you when we were children," Loki says from his former location.

"I can learn tricks too, brother."

There is a butterfly perched on top of the rosebush above Loki's head, ice wings reflecting the light in a thousand rainbow shards. Thor reaches for another piece of fruit, and does nothing to prove or disprove its reality. Loki is entitled to keep a few secrets.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Wolves of Ice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25002580) by [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)


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